Conservative MP Maxime Bernier participates in an interview with The Canadian Press in his office on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin TangJustin Tang / THE CANADIAN PRESS

I love ya, Maxime. But ya gotta shut up in public.

Maxime Bernier, the lawyer and businessperson who is the Conservative MP for Beauce in Quebec is one of the smartest, most pro-freedom politicians in the country.

Bernier’s in favour of entrepreneurship and maximizing individual liberty. He’s against corporate welfare and equalization payments, believing handouts to corporations prevent competition and innovation and equalization encourages have-not provinces to maintain high-tax, high-spending regimes that keep them poorer than the national average.

He’s a radical in Ottawa terms arguing for “more decentralized federalism and a smaller federal government less involved in Canadians’ day-to-day lives.” In general “issues should be handled by the most local competent authority, the one closest to the people.”

Last year, he lost the national Conservative leadership to Andrew Sheer by less than 2% of the total vote on the final ballot.

And he’s right about the Trudeau government pushing too much diversity. The Liberals do practice “extreme multiculturalism” and promote the “cult of victimhood.”

Too much diversity and an extreme multiculturalism is bad for a pluralistic society. That may seem counterintuitive, but too much focus on what makes us different from one another drives us apart. It doesn’t bring us together.

One of the negative side effects of social media has been the new obsession with identity politics.

For the most part, social media has been a great thing. It has democratized the news and enabled people to reconnect with friends from their pasts and to find new friends – anywhere – who share their interests.

But at the same time, social media has encouraged many users to band together with others who share their narrow views and obsess on what they see as slights and insults and injustices by the greater society.

That’s true on both sides of the ideological spectrum, from white nationalists to involuntary celibates to Black Lives Matters to climate change alarmists. It is now possible to wrap ourselves in cocoons made up only of arguments that confirm our own biases and prejudices.

It’s the same with “extreme multiculturalism.” Encouraging minority communities to focus on their own ways also encourages some to remain apart and cloistered. That not only sometimes fosters a “cult of victimhood,” it can also deprive our greater society of the influences of newcomers – ideas, art, culture, traditions, beliefs and so on.

That’s what Bernier is afraid of with the Liberals’ focus on open immigration and extreme multiculturalism.

I was lucky enough to be privy to an online debate among Canadian libertarians this week, to whom Bernier is a hero. Many were disappointed by his stance, feeling it played into more stereotypical views on immigration.

But an excess of multiculturalism (as different from an excess of immigration) can put liberal values at risk if newcomers are encouraged to retain old grudges and prejudices from their homelands and not encouraged to adopt Canadian values about, for example, the equality of women or the acceptance of LGBTQ citizens.

The Dutch politician, Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002, was a gay sociologist who opposed extreme multiculturalism because he thought it put the Netherlands’ liberal culture at risk to extremist values.

Still, even if he’s right, Max has got to save his ideas for the caucus room.

As liberal as his views are at heart, it is simply the way our system works that individual MPs attempt to influence party policy inside the caucus room, then stand behind the leader in public.

Bernier is risking coming off as a spotlight seeking gloryhound. And by reducing his party’s electoral chances, he is also reducing the possibility his views will ever become government policy in the future.

If he helps the Liberals get re-elected, he’ll never change multicultural policy.

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